Clarisse Thorn

I write and speak about subcultures, sexuality, and new media.

Every once in a while, someone will ask me a question about something BDSM-related that I feel “done with”; I feel like I did all my thinking about those topics, years ago. But it’s still useful to get those questions today, because it forces me to try and understand where my head was at, three to seven years ago. It forces me to calibrate my inner processes. I often think of these questions as the “simple” ones, or the “101” questions, because they are so often addressed in typical conversation among BDSMers. Then again, lots of people don’t have access to a BDSM community, or aren’t interested in their local BDSM community for whatever reason. Therefore, it’s useful for me to cover those “simple” questions on my blog anyway.

Plus, just because a question is simple doesn’t mean the question is not interesting.

One such question is the “BDSM versus sex” question. Is BDSM always sex? Is it always sexual? A lot of people see BDSM as something that “always” includes sex, or is “always sexual in some way”. In the documentary “BDSM: It’s Not What You Think!“, one famous BDSM writer is quoted saying something like: “I would say that eros is always involved in BDSM, even if the participants aren’t doing anything that would look sexual to non-BDSMers.”

But a lot of other people see BDSM, and the BDSM urge, as something that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex — that is separate from sex.

I see two sides to this question: the political side, and the “how does it feel?” side. Both sides are intertwined; when it comes to sex, politics can’t help shaping our experiences (and vice versa). I acknowledge this. And yet even when I try to account for that, there is still something deeply different about the way my body feels my BDSM urges, as opposed to how my body feels sexual urges. I don’t think that those bodily differences could ever quite go away, no matter how my mental angle on those processes changed.

“BDSM versus sex” could be viewed as a facet of that constant and irritating question — “What is sex, anyway?” I’ve always found that the more you look at the line between “what is sex” and “what is not sex”, the more blurred the line becomes.

For example, no one can agree about what words like “slut” or “whore” actually mean. As another example, recall that ridiculous national debate that happened across America when Bill Clinton told us that he hadn’t had sex with Monica — and then admitted to getting a blowjob from her. Is oral sex sex? Maybe oral sex isn’t sex! Flutter, flutter, argue, argue.

It is my experience that (cisgendered, heterosexual) women are often more likely to claim that oral sex is not sex, while (cis, het) men are more likely to claim that oral sex is sex. I suspect this is because women face steeper social penalties for having sex (no one wants to be labeled a “slut”), so we are typically more motivated to claim that sex acts “don’t count” as sex … whereas men are usually congratulated for having sex (more notches on the bedpost!), so men are typically more motivated to claim that sex acts “count” as sex. (Unless they’re Bill Clinton.)

So we already have this weird ongoing debate, about what “qualifies” as sex. And you throw in fetishes such as BDSM, and everyone gets confused all over again. A cultural example of this confusion came up in 2009, when a bunch of professional dominatrixes got arrested in New York City … for being dominatrixes … which everyone previously believed was legal. Flutter, flutter, argue, argue, and it turns out that “prostitution” (which is illegal in New York) is defined as “sexual conduct for money”.

But what does “sexual conduct” mean? At least one previous court had set the precedent that BDSM-for-pay is not the same as “sexual conduct for money” … and yet, in 2009, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office decided that “sexual conduct” means “anything that is arousing to the participants” … and then decided that this suddenly meant they ought to go arrest dominatrixes. It’s not clear why the Manhattan DA did not, then, also begin arresting strippers. And what about random vanilla couples on a standard date-type thing, where the woman makes eyes at the man over dinner, and the man pays for the meal? Sounds like “sexual conduct for money” to me. Which could totally be prostitution, folks, so watch your backs.

If practicing kinky sex makes you “other”, not one of “us”, if it has non-sexual implications, if it means you’re defective or dangerous — who wants that? And so as “kinky sex” and its practitioners are demonized, everyone is concerned — am I one of “those people”? It makes people fear their fantasies or curiosity, which then acquire too much power. It leads to secrecy between partners, as people withhold information about their preferences or experiences.

… I’d like to destroy the idea of binary contrast — that kinky and non-kinky sex are clearly different. Instead, I suggest that kinky and vanilla sex are parts of a continuum, the wide range of human eroticism. We all slide side to side along that continuum during our lives, sometimes in a single week. We don’t need to fear our fantasies, curiosity, or (consensual) sexual preferences. They don’t make us bad or different, just human. Some people like being emotional outlaws. They’ll always find a way to get the frisson of otherness. But most people don’t want to live that way. So ending kink’s status as dangerous and wrong, and its practitioners as “other,” is the most liberating thing we can do — for everyone.

That’s certainly reasonable from a political standpoint. I’ve made similar arguments. (Some folks, such as the brilliant male submissive writer maymay, also argue against the common idea that “kink” is limited to “BDSM”; they prefer an expansive definition of “kink” that denotes a vaster cornucopia of sexuality.)

Plus, I even suspect that a lot of the distinctions made by BDSMers ourselves are based far more on stigma than sense. For example, when I was younger, I went through a period where I couldn’t stand to have the word “submissive” applied to myself. I insisted that I was into BDSM solely for the physical sensation, and swore I would never ever do something solely submission-oriented (such as wearing a collar). It was like I could only handle BDSM as long as I distanced myself from the power elements; the power elements carried too much stigma in my head for me to acknowledge them … yet.

I also used to carefully separate “BDSM” from “sex” in my head. Part of me felt like, “If my desire for pain and power is sexual, then it’s weird. If it’s not sexual, then it’s less weird.” (It looks strange when I type it, now, but I guess that’s how sexual stigma works: it rarely holds up against the clear light of day.) It took me a while to integrate sexuality into my BDSM practice. In contrast, I once met a couple who told me that it took them a long time to do BDSM that wasn’t part of sex. In their heads, the thought was more like: “If the desire for pain and power is sexual, then it’s not weird. But if it’s not sexual, then it’s really weird.”

I’ve heard of plenty of dungeons where sex is not allowed — sometimes for legal reasons, but sometimes because there is actually a social standard against it: people are like, “Dude, let’s not get our nice pure BDSM all dirty by including sex.” (Note: My experience is primarily with dungeons owned by “lifestyle” BDSMers — “lifestyle” being a clumsy word that attempts to denote those of us who are motivated to do BDSM for reasons other than money. While there is some overlap between “lifestyle” BDSM and professional BDSM, the overlap can be surprisingly rare, and professional BDSM is often banned at lifestyle BDSM parties. Lifestyle dungeons are often non-profit organizations, and often function more like community centers than moneymaking venues. I understand that some professional dungeons have a “no sex” rule out of a desire to protect the boundaries of dominatrixes who work there, who may not wish to be asked to engage in sex.)

There are also plenty of cultural groups who do things that look suspiciously like BDSM … who insist that they have nothing to do with BDSM. For example, I’ve heard of spanking clubs whose members get really mad if you dare bring BDSM up in their presence.

And then there’s groups like Taken In Hand, a quasi-conservative organization. Actual testimonial from the Taken In Hand site:

There are lots of websites for people in the BDSM, D/s, DD (domestic discipline) and spanking communities. There are websites for people who belong to religions that advocate male-head-of-household marriage. There are even websites for Christians who are interested in BDSM. But there are very few websites for people who are interested in male-led intimate relationships but who are not interested in all that the above communities associate with this kind of relationship (jargon, clothes, etc.) Some of us don’t even like thinking of this as a lifestyle.

Well, my friend, you know what … you can refuse to call yourself BDSM all you want, and you can reject our “jargon” all you want, and you can “dislike” thinking of this “lifestyle” until the end of time … and you have every right to insist that we have nothing to do with you. But when your site has posts that include comments like “When my husband behaves in a dominant manner I basically swoon,” or have titles like “Don’t forget your whip,” well … I’m just saying.

Also, since you mention rejecting BDSM “clothes”? I’ll just say that I can be an astoundingly badass domme in a t-shirt. And I have done so. Multiple times.

So yeah. Nowadays, many of these “BDSM versus sex” reactions strike me as being born out of pure, irrational stigma. As Dr. Klein noted, these reactions are usually born of the terrible human urge to exclude: to find ways to differentiate ourselves from “those people”. Humans apparently love to think things like: “I’m not like those people. It doesn’t matter if I, for example, write extensive rape fantasy fiction! That couldn’t possibly be BDSM! Because I’m not a BDSMer! Because BDSM is dirty.”

But we shouldn’t necessarily blame people for this instinct to reject and categorize: the instinct is one that comes from being scared and oppressed … because the social penalties for “getting it wrong” are high. Remember, those New York City dominatrixes thought they were “safe” from the law as long as BDSM didn’t count as sex. But as soon as someone decided BDSM “counted as” sex, those dominatrixes were arrested.

It’s just one more example of how sexual stigma for “different kinds of sex” is constantly intertwined. No type of consensual sexuality can express itself freely until people agree that “among consenting adults, there is no ‘should’.” The Romans, those ancient imperialists, used to say: “Divide and conquer.” When consensual sexualities are scared of each other, we will continue to be conquered. As long as “vanilla” people are afraid of “BDSM” … as long as “BDSMers” are afraid of being seen as “sexual” … as long as the social penalties for being a “slut” or a “whore” are incredibly steep … as long as sex workers are stigmatized and criminalized … everyone will be bound by these oppressive standards.

10 responses to “BDSM versus Sex, Part 1: Divide and Conquer”

I know of a lot of places where BDSM is seperated from sex because of legality (pro Dommes trying to remain outside of prostitution laws, liquor licensing for public play venues, etc.) And I know of several niche areas of BDSM where the absence of sex is part of the kink. Submissive men into chastity play and Key Holders standing prominent among them.

But I don’t know very many people at all where BDSM isn’t sexual. Where a flogging, or rope bondage isn’t intimate and sensual and essentially foreplay. Etc.

A while back (a few years now) in my local scene, there were some people who weren’t into sex as part of public BDSM play. Even at clubs or parties where sex on premises was legal and appropriate, they frowned very strongly on the whole idea, complained to party hosts about people having sex in the vicinity of play equipment, had tantrums about someone getting a blow job in a quiet corner after a scene etc.

There was a bit of a storm in a digital teacup over the whole thing before it blew over – but the consensus for my local area was pretty clear and resounding – most of the people going to public events were fine with sex being part of scenes and wanted to be able to engage in that sort of play themselves. The only thing we found any real bulk objection too was people monopolizing play spaces with equipment/room to swing a flogger so they could have extended vanilla sex, when there were perfectly good other spaces to fuck while people actually used the limited availability impact play spaces/suspension points/medical rooms for their named purpose.

On BDSM clothes? I typically wear a suit, or a pair of comfortable black pants and a black t-shirt to kink events. I sometimes dress up and wear a black jacket. If I get really creative, I wear a pair of leather suspenders. I love seeing people in corsets and latex and lots of kinky paraphernalia. But it’s absolutely not required. In our local scene, the ‘dress in black’ requirement for people not wearing leather/latex is just about minimizing tourists in Jeans and Jim Bean t-shirts who want to stare at the weirdos. It’s one thing to play for an appreciative audience, it’s another be stared at like a freak show.

Personally, BDSM is often sexual in quite a direct way for me. However, there’s plenty of ways or situations in which it really isn’t. Sometimes, as top or bottom, even physical play is just not sexual. It’s physical, and it’s pleasure, but not really sexual.

More often, it’s the mental field, things like D/s and discipline play, which is just sparky brain buzz pleasure but in a generalised, not necessarily sexual, way. It can be used to add to sexual pleasures from other aspects (or even the same aspects!) of BDSM, but it doesn’t have to be sexual in itself to be fun or worth doing as play/lifestyle involvement.

I think there are intersections of BDSM with romance, sex, love, sport and all sorts, but there are bits of BDSM that fall outside of any of these overlaps, but are their own kind of pleasure. As I said in that link to my responses to Newmahr’s work, I feel like BDSM isn’t always sex but is also “its own kind of thing”.

I guess I have a hard time talking about the political, without referencing the embodied (differences in) experience first. It seems to me that the political dimension is made up of people putting interpretations on embodied experiences of other people.

I think that Newmahr highlights this quite well, and the main point of my comment above was just to link to my discussion of her findings to talk about this, and the political aspects that she draws out.

In particular it seems that what you’re discussing in the OP is different people’s ways of interpreting the significance of BDSM, deciding what it “means”. What it means about “those people”, what it means about “me”, what it means about “humanity” or “society”.

But the thing that stands out most clearly in the OP is that the meanings and distinctions are very personal to the individuals. They come from the experiences, or imagination of the experiences. It’s not just an “about” question, it’s a “to” question as well: “what does it mean to me?” and not just, “what does it mean about me?” And that’s the point at which I find it impossible to deal with the political except by addressing the personal – the “embodied differences in experience”.

I guess I am also unclear as to the purpose of the OP: is it meant to be documenting the different takes (in which case, I got thrown because of your own personal responses to various people’s takes on it, and it seems a little bit higgledy-piggledy) or is it meant as a polemic, saying other people have got it wrong?

Interesting approach to the topic, I love your writing. I certainly think it warrants a certain level of community discussion how we incorporate sexuality into our BDSM. I think possibly the BDSM world is going through a conceptual shift right now in how it approaches sexuality and love. I am reminded of how, in colonial america, sex, pleasure, and procreation were all intimately linked. The colonists had no concept of the idea of sex that wasn’t for pleasure, or sex that wasn’t for baby making. It simply was that sex included both of those things. It wasn’t until the industrial era, when kids became problematic, that the two got de-linked, and the moralization of sex for pleasure began.

That’s kind of how I feel about sex and love, and sex and BDSM: We’re coming from a background where the concept of these things existing outside of each other simply isn’t (disclaimer: my knowledge of BDSM history is not as strong as I’d like it to be). Some bold pioneers are starting to talk about it, some others are being loud extremists in opinion, and still others are backlashing against it. Meanwhile, we’re all here somewhere in the middle, watching a concept shift happen, and wondering why everybody is getting so heated and crazy “us vs them” about the topic!
Ultimately, I tend to think of sex, love, consensual power exchange, bondage, and sadomasochism as all separate but not mutually exclusive experiences. Somebody may love their dominant but not be sexual. Somebody might just like being tied up and it has nothing to do with sex or love or power. Maybe somebody else is really into sex and sadomasochism. I don’t think there’s one essentialist or “right” way to experience sex or BDSM, and really it’s up to the individual negotiations the persons engaged in whatever make.

That’s fair, Snowdrop. I originally wrote the post as one big post, but I’ve been trying to shorten my posts lately (partly to take the burden off myself as a blogger) so I decided to experiment with publishing this one in parts. But now I’m thinking that it’s just fundamentally incomplete without the section on embodiment. C’est la vie.

A kind of interesting thought that has cropped up in my head while reading this. For me, if it is BDSM, then it can be consensual and performative and queer and (rightfully) fulfilling. If it isn’t BDSM, it is oppressive, those involved have false consciousness, it traditional, and its patriarchal.

So when the example of Taken in Hand came up, my instant response to a non-BDSM, religious group that was down with male domination was that that is not okay at all. Yet I have lots of room for BDSM in my feminism.

Not quite sure what to do with this. Because I still feel pretty not okay with Taken in Hand for example. Maybe I need to set clearer line between “good” BDSM and “bad” BDSM in my head (not sure that you’d be an advocate of this) in the same way that I see “good” ways of being in a heterosexual relationship and “bad” ways of being in a heterosexual relationship.

The hierarchy of good/bad is not particularly appealing, but I think that it’s pretty clear that as feminists, there are ways that oppression and patriarchy appear in our relationships that we should be critical of.

I, Clarisse, respond by saying that I usually try to draw the “consent” line about whether it’s okay or not okay, and then I look at how the involved parties are consenting to what they’re doing. It seems clear to me that at least some of the Taken In Hand people are consenting to the activities, even if those activities are patriarchal; it also seems clear to me that there are people involved who aren’t actually very excited about it, or who wouldn’t be into doing BDSM that way if they knew that there were other ways to do it. But I don’t want to draw their own consent lines for them.

I will say that in my more recent thinking, I’ve concluded that for me, the line between BDSM that is sketchy vs. BDSM that is not sketchy often falls along where the abuse-scholar concepts of “minimizing, denying and blaming” begins. (I just recently wrote a post about this.) If one partner is pretending that violence/power/pain is not happening, or is blaming the other partner for the violence/power/pain, or is acting like the violence/power/pain “doesn’t count” or “doesn’t matter”, then that’s abuse. But as long as the parties involved can talk about the violence/power/pain, and as long as everyone involved thinks that their feelings are being heard and their limits are being respected, then it’s not abuse.

Yet … I keep thinking about it and wanting to say more, because false consciousness can be such a powerful thing, and that “fog” that abused partners can enter into is so overwhelming too; Autumn wrote us a powerful guest post about this recently. But I also really have trouble taking a stand that actually denies anyone the right to define their own consent, right now, in this moment.

I think that avoiding minimizing/denying/blaming also has a lot to do with honestly making space for a partner’s objections. You have to listen, and help them believe that you’re listening, and help them believe that you want to hear their concerns. This I think is where my main problem is with people like Taken In Hand — I read some testimonials from the submissive partners and I get the feeling that they honestly don’t believe their words, their experience, is as important or as worthy as the dominant partners’. They don’t believe they deserve the space to articulate any objections they might have, or even think about those objections.

This is a great article, and the intersection of sex, kink, and politics is one that I’m still learning about and catching up to. And despite this question being discussed over and over in my own community and online, you’re right: it’s still an interesting question worth returning to.

I also tend to separate sexuality from BDSM in order to control the kinds of experiences I have when I play publicly. In private with my sexual partners, the two are very much intertwined. It’s at the point that I’m not sure anymore how satisfied I would be having sex that doesn’t involve intense sensation, rope, teeth, etc.

I’m with SnowdropExplodes in that it’s also hard for me to separate out the “how it feels” aspects with the political side of what is and isn’t sexual. But your insight on the human urge to exclude is something I’ve noticed as well – the binary thought process of us versus them and the false dichotomies inherent to that kind of thinking. It’s incredibly frustrating to see that in general, and worse to see already stigmatized groups turn around and stigmatize other subcultures and alternative groups.

And I’m certain I’ve been guilty of that myself. It’s really good to have this kind of reminder to self-check my assumptions and gut reactions.

About Clarisse

On the other hand, I also wrote a different book about the subculture of men who trade tips on how to seduce and manipulate women:

I give great lectures on my favorite topics. I've spoken at a huge variety of places — academic institutions like the University of Chicago; new media conventions like South By Southwest; museums like the Museum of Sex; and lots of others.

I established myself by creating this blog. I don't update the blog much anymore, but you can still read my archives. My best writing is available in my books, anyway.

I've lived in Swaziland, Greece, Chicago, and a lot of other places. I've worked in game design, public health, and bookstores. Now I live in San Francisco, and I make my living with content strategy and user research.